To be fair, senile grandparents making **** up and re-inventing their personal narratives to make them sound far more prescient and heroic is pretty standard. If your average younger Trumpkin claims their 95 year old grandparent said something, ~80% it's totally invented by the younger Trumpkin, 20% likely it's the result of the geriatric old geezer making **** up themselves which the younger person is uncritically repeating. ChrisV is correct that it was entirely common for Germans from the late Weimar/early Nazi era to claim post-hoc that they witnessed the rise of Hitler with great trepidation instead of cheering it on. You can imagine they eventually immigrated here and had garbage progeny who are Trumpkins and repeat their dumb warnings on the internet.

There were actually a lot of Germans who viewed Hitler with great trepidation, I mean at the time of his ascent something like 20% of Germans were voting Communist, I can't imagine they were very happy. What did not exist were Germans who were unaware of what type of leader Hitler was going to be. I don't mean they saw the whole thing coming, totalitarianism and the Holocaust and so on, but that Hitler was going to viciously suppress political opposition was blatantly obvious. The Sturmabteilung had been openly brawling with party enemies for a decade. It would be like if Trump managed to persecute political opponents with the machinery of the state, nobody could claim it was hard to see coming. They literally chant for Clinton to be locked up at rallies.

I mean, the guy would have been 8 years old in 1930.

Sure, I agree; the Nazis never had total popular consensus. But I think it's equally true a lot of Germans rationalized their tacit or overt consent to Nazism away post hoc, and invented narratives that obscured their own complicity.

It's irrelevant in this case since this dude on Twitter almost surely made up the anecdote, I'm just noting that it's not uncommon for Germans who were alive during the time to portray themselves as opposed to Nazis instead of passively or actively complicit.

Say what you will about NPR but if there is something more hilarious than pasty Ivy league low-talkers giving serious reviews on the latest hip hop album they clearly know nothing about I demand to hear it at once

Yeah I think we agree. "We didn't think it could happen in Germany" is just such obvious bull****, like it portrays Germany as some kind of stable, prosperous democracy instead of a failing state with food shortages and violent street brawls between political opponents, which wilfully elected a strongman because that's what they thought was required. It's probably that the guy invented the anecdote, could also certainly be revisionist history from the grandfather.

Ok cool. Now that we've debunked that little derposphere tidbit, on to the next of the 97 pieces put out in the last hour...

FWIW that showed up on my feed because it was liked by Brendan Eich, the inventor of Javascript. Imagine what a hardcore right-wing woke bro's feed looks like?

NPR has really good science content. A lot of it is super easy though. Just book Lisa Randall, introduce her as a particle phenomenologist, ask wtf particle phenomenology is and let her answer for 7 min. Anybody can do it but hardly anybody outside of NPR does.

Yeah I enjoy their science stuff.

For my money the best content on NPR is produced by others, and can only be found locally. Most of it occurs on the weekend. Ted Radio Hour is usually good, Radiolab is good, This American Life, Echoes, et al. I discovered Harry Shearer's Le Show on Tallahassee's local station, last time I was up there it still aired at 1 PM on Sundays, but I can't get it where I live now so I just get the podcast.

My current favorite is Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Ugh I hated that show when I listened to the radio. Audio smugness at it's worst.

Wait Wait is good if the panel is good, but if it's bad ie if Paula Poundstone is present it can be pretty awful radio.

RIP Carl Kasell

There were 29k people there for the convention, we had enough issues with people stopping in the middle of the walkways for pictures, let alone having the media do it!

I mean it's been said many times many ways but:

Group A: Let's expel or exterminate all ethnic minorities and establish a white ethnostate along explicitly neo-fascist lines

Group B: Let's destroy Group A's ability to organise and recruit

Smart, Thinking Centrist Who's Seen A Few Things In His Time: It's like I'm seeing double here, folks, no difference, full-on last paragraph of Animal Farm up in here, wow.

It's just guesswork, but I would guess that fear of being doxxed was a bigger reason people didn't show up. Last time a bunch of people lost their jobs. There was chatter on far-right forums about how they couldn't afford to show up for that reason.

Yeah, it's this.

Yeah and Blackkklansman

One thing that REALLY pisses off deplorables is supporting ANTIFA. Try it the next time you get into a debate over civility and it eventually gets to the topic of ANTIFA vs Nazis. A lot of Trump supporters connect with this issue at a visceral level and it seems to trigger a strong emotional response that pointing out Trump's corruption can never do to them.

I recall one guy trying to get me to admit ANTIFA was bad and on the same level as Nazis because they use violence. I pointed out that I LOVE watching Masterlock padlocks connecting with Nazi domes and it short-circuited him. Just yuck it up and don't give them an inch in the conversation. They want you to say violence is NEVER okay and that both sides are bad actors - do NOT do this.

Their only counter is to further push that both sides are equally bad or eventually admit they side more with Nazis. When this debate occurs in front of an audience it can produce some interesting results as Billy slowly reveals he's a Nazi sympathizer.

I can't really blame someone for equating anime with nazi support because of 4chan and the like but its an unfair comparision. I grew up watching all the great animes like pokemon and yugioh and overall anime is very anti - nazi.

Things that really seem to trigger deplorables:

People who fight fascists
Kids who survived a horrific gun attack at their school
Parents of children gunned down in school attacks
Transgender teens who want to use the bathroom they identify with
Jimmy Carter (well my religious aunt absolutely hates him anyway)
NFL players protesting police brutality
Gold Star families who dare speak out against Trump
POW heroes who dare speak out against Trump
Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarret, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Maxine Waters
Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi

Pretty sure that of all the presidents who've served in my lifetime, Jimmy is one of two (Dubya) who was actually irl religious in any meaningful sense of the word. (Even Dubya is questionable, but he at least walked the talk somewhat)

Yep, which is why he seems to get under her skin the most.

W was definitely religious by the time he became potus, but maybe not traditional Waspy religion. More like religion as self help, Jesus helped me stop drinking stuff. Carter seems religious in the more standard sense. Both are annoying in their own way.

In what way is Carter annoying? Jeez.

(You're so FOS if you answered you'd probably try to attack him from left.)